New type of Cancer treatment

A new therapeutic approach that targets an aggressive form of lymphoma may greatly increase the efficacy of treatment and result in better outcomes for patients, according to new research by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is an aggressive cancer of the B-cells, a type of white blood cell. It is the most common form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, affecting approximately 20,000 Americans each year. Current therapies are ineffective for at least 40 percent of patients with DLBCL and come with severe side effects ranging from fever and nausea to heart and nerve damage.
Scientists from Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the University of Michigan Medical School found that a combination therapy that targets proteins in cancer cells was more effective than either of the drugs alone. The researchers used an experimental drug developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering called PU-H71, which binds to Hsp90 to trap it in a complex with the other proteins it stabilizes, known as client proteins. With this method, they identified client proteins that are critical to lymphoma survival and can be targeted therapeutically. They then treated lymphoma cells in petri dishes, mice and human tumor samples with PU-H71 and ibrutinib, a drug that is used to treat lymphoma that targets one of the major lymphoma survival pathways identified. Every time, the drug combination proved to be more effective at killing lymphoma cells than ibrutinib or PU-H71 alone.
“PU-H71 acts like a stone thrown at a window,” Goldstein said. “It hits the window – the cancer cell – and makes all these cracks. It weakens it. And then ibrutinib comes in and just taps it, and it falls apart.”
The investigators expect this new combination therapy to soon move into a phase II clinical trial. If successful there, cancer treatment could move in a whole new direction.